A rather curious report has emerged from the Deutsche Bank technology conference in Las Vegas.

Texas Instruments CEO Richard Templeton told the gathering that he has “lost some interest” in seeing the company’s chips used in smartphones and tablets. Although it is rather unusual to see a tech CEO say is lost interest in design wins, Templeton makes an interesting point.

Templeton argues that the size and quality of opportunities in those wireless products have declined. The two main players in the market, Apple and Samsung, vertically integrating chips into their gear, so there doesn’t appear to be as much room for chipmakers like Texas Instruments. We are not sure Qualcomm and Nvidia would agree with his assessment, but still it is a valid point.

Although Templeton might not be as interested in design wins as one might expect, Texas Instruments announced a few high-profile design wins in recent weeks, the most significant of which was Amazon’s Kindle Fire range. However, until OMAP 5 chips arrive, TI simply won’t have competitive high-end chips to take on Qualcomm’s S4 line or Samsung’s Exynos 4. Skeptics might say that this explains Templeton’s sudden lack of interest in the hotly contested smartphone/tablet market.

Templeton told the crowd that Texas Instruments plans to expand into automotive and industrial markets.

Texas Instruments is not as loud as Nvidia when it comes to public relations, but this company sure has something to say about the future and Windows 8 for their OMAP devices. It is still louder than the super conservative Qualcomm.

The nice chat starts little bit like this. “With respect to Windows 8 on the OMAP platform, the team here at TI is excited to work with Microsoft. Overall, most vendors today accelerate audio and video, but from our perspective—it’s time to move past the “speeds-and-feeds” way of thinking. Instead, through OMAP, we focus on offloading processing tasks to maximize the any device’s efficiency. “

This is how Texas Instruments elaborate their focus for Windows 8. Remember OMAP 5 has two slower processor cores and two high-end Cortex A15 cores. These two Cortex M4 processors will deal with less demanding stuff. This is what Nvidia is doing with its Kal El, incorporating a slow 500MHz processor for less demanding task and four Cortex A9 processors for heavy lifting. It looks like this is the way to go for ARM manufacturers and this level of flexibility, not seen in the x86 world, offers clear advantages in power efficiency.

“The OMAP platform has the unique ability to offload tasks from the GPU and CPU to the hardware accelerators and other engines, which will be key to running Windows 8 efficiently on end products.” said Heather L. Ailara, Wireless Media Relations Manager at Texas instruments.

Hardware accelerators traditionally can do things with less power and this might be the key to longer battery life with Windows 8 on ARM chips such are OMAP 4 or OMAP 5.

“It’s not about funning fast all the time – it’s about running smart. We have to add that most dual core chips on the market are quite fast, but it would be cool to have slightly better battery life with the new operating system, and we are hearing that things should last longer with Windows 8 and ARM alliance including Texas Instruments will be there to help.”

The guys from Texas Instruments believe that upcoming quad cores might have an issue to feed all cores with memory data.

Current OMAP 4 chips have dual channel memory that is supposed to be dominant to competition memory solutions and Texas Instruments wants to carry on with this dominance. The company told Fudzilla that next generation 28nm platform, scheduled for 2012 release will be able to address as much as 8GB memory.

You are lucky if your current phone or tablet supports and have 1GB of RAM, and OAMP 5 and other competing solutions scheduled for release in late 2012 should probably be able to address as much.

Applications will become more serious and the Jxx version of Google’s Android, the one that comes after Ice Cream Sandwich should be able to work battery with larger memory size. Unfortunately this all only happens in late 2012, a year from now, but maybe the competition, mainly Qualcomm and Nvidia might come up with similar memory capabilities a bit earlier.

The 28nm process is slowly becoming available, and it is realistic to expect some of the 28nm mobile ARM based chips even in 1H 2012.

Brian Carlson of Texas Instruments talked to Fudzilla about 2012 and the company's plans to release OMAP 5, which should be ready for market in the fall of 2012, roughly a year from now. It didn’t stop there as we heard a bits and pieces about TI's 2013 plans.

We won’t call it OMAP 6, but the 20nm chip that is planned as a successor of OMAP 5 should enable true all day computing. When asked to define all day true computing, Brian said to expect a battery life to last for from early in the morning until you are ready to hit the pillow.

This should be better than a battery life of a 4-inch or similar smart phone today. With a lot of action it will barely survive a morning to night schedule. Today we are talking about less than 8 hours continuous use for most of phones and tablets, and things in the future should be better than that, a lot better.

Future chips will make things better and Texas Instruments talks about more efficient power saves built in hardware. It wants to focus a lot on better memory access, intelligent cashing as apparently these tasks drain a lot of the power. The 20nm chips could be so smart that they should be able to dynamically cut consumption by going to sleep more, to show down automatically and wake up faster. This is a part of the plan how to make your tablet battery life better.

At this time, there is no announcements on new batteries, it looks like we are stuck with the current crop of Lithium Ion batteries for at least through 2012 and 2013.

OMAP 5 is a Texas Instrument CPU that comes at some point in 2012, most likely the latter half of the year.

This 28nm part was already taped out in very late 2010 and it won’t be long since customers get the sample chips in 28nm. The factory of choice is UMC but Brian Carlson, product manager at Texas Instrument said that they can easily pick another fab if necessary and get more chips if the customers need them.

Brian told Fudzilla that it will probably take a year before we seen retail products based on 28nm OMAP 5 as this is how long the design cycle takes in this phone oriented industry.

Xmas 2012 is already looks promising as Nvidia should have Wayne 28nm ARM A15 part and Qualcomm should also have its 28nm MSM8960 aka. Krait CPU. Of course, other ARM players will have next generation chips by then, but design details are still sketchy.

Let’s not forget that Windows 8 should come around that time, and that OMAP 5 fully supports Windows as well as Ice Cream Sandwich, and probably the H branded successor.

Texas Instruments comes with 2MB of cache for the two cores, which is twice as much than you see today and it believes that it might have the bandwidth benefit over its competitors. It’s still too early as Nvidia still has to talk about its 28nm parts and we don’t know much about Apple’s A6, either.

OMAP 4 is yet to ship in some devices, most likely after Mobile World congress next week in Barcelona, and Texas instruments has already dared to talk about 2H 2012 and OMAP 5 quad core platform.

A chap called Brian Carlson, TI's product manager for the 28nm OMAP 5 generation, has revealed a few bits and pieces about the new platform. The key element is that this is a quad-core 28nm processor for mobile phones and mobile computers (tablets) that has two ARM Cortex A15 cores capable of 2GHz each and two ARM M4 processors for low-power offload and real-time responsiveness. This combination should offer 2 two 3 times faster performance versus OMAP 4.

The next cool thing is the new PowerVR SGX544 graphics core that is supposed to be five times faster than OMAP 4 that we talked about. Of course this will mean really good gaming and support for a lot of 3D, even the glass less 3D and augmented reality. There is also support for larger screens. The new graphics is supposed to consume less power than the OMAP 4 but we will have to see about that.

IVA 3 HD multimedia accelerator can drive full HD 1080p at 60FPS or 3D HD 1080p at 30FPS, either of which sounds great. The camera interface goes as high as 24 Mpixel, or 12 Mpixel in 3D stereo mode. M-Shield technology should take care of projection and there are some hints of Near field communication called mobile wallet. Starting with Google Nexus S everyone wants to go there in the near future.

Videos with Brian are hinting DLP Pico projector support, gesture recognition as well as four display support, augmented 3D gaming, wireless video, 3D picture support, glass free 3D support, HD video teleconferencing, a lot of what we might even see in some advanced devices in 2011. Let’s not forget the support for HDMI 1.4a, USB 3.0, SATA 2.0 as well as SD 3.0.

Don’t worry, LTE and other multi modem high speed internet standards are there, too. Just imagine, a phone that can connect to three LCDs and a HDMI at the same time and can support four cameras (two at the front and two at the back). Of course it will support multiple operating systems.

The smartphone / tablet version of the OMAP 5 is called 5430 and it supports dual channel LP DDR2. It is a 14x14 mm chip with 980 balls. Let me remind you that this product goes after 28nm, Tegra 3 generation, just for your information. They even made a press release for the 2H 2012 chip. Looks cool doesn’t it.